Internet-based social networks (e.g., websites or portals where large numbers of users interact with each other and maintain online connections and relationships with their friends) have emerged as one of the central and most important means of social communication and interaction on the contemporary Internet. It is not surprising, therefore, that these social networks are also of intense interest to advertisers and others. Among the features of Internet-based social network systems that make them so desirable to advertisers and the like is the fact that users of these systems tend to maintain lists of connections to friends, acquaintances and others. Examples of social networks that employ such mechanisms are Twitter™, Facebook™, Google Plus™ and LinkedIn™.
Often, in order for an online connection to be created between two such users, a “target friend” of a user has to confirm his/her agreement to create the connection, making the connection that much more reliable from the point of view of the advertisers, etc. In some instances, upon creation of such connections the connected individuals automatically begin receiving information regarding one another's activities (e.g., a “personal news feed”). Information included in such personal news feeds may include expressions of preferences for a particular object (e.g., video, picture, piece of music, comment, post, link, etc.), so indicated by a user “liking” the object, updates regarding the posting of an article or comments on another user's actions, etc. In order to maintain control and protect users' privacy, social networks impose privacy constraints on what kind of material each user may access. A typical constraint is to allow users to access only updates from their friends and, perhaps, friends-of-friends and not beyond (unless, say, the subject material is publicly accessible).
Each user in a social network typically has many friends, sometimes hundreds. These friends represent connections from a multitude of facets of a subject user's life, including, but not limited to, the user's family, workplace colleagues, friends from school(s), fellow hobbyists, association members, etc. The range of actions and activities in each group is typically of interest only to the members of the subject group and not to all of the user's other “friends”. Displaying all the updates to all of the user's friends is therefore often excessive and imposes a burden on friends having little or no interest in the subject matter of the updates. Such unfettered sharing of information may also lead to breaches of privacy (both real and perceived), since often certain updates or portions thereof should be constrained to members of a target audience.
One solution to this problem is to divide all friends of a user into groups, where members within each group are associated and related to each other through one of the above-mentioned facets of the subject user's life. Contemporary Internet-based social networks sometimes provide means for users to create such groups manually (e.g., by separately classifying each friend or contact in some fashion), however, these manual processes tend to be very tedious and many users are unwilling to invest the time and effort necessary to create and maintain such groupings. Recently, Google Plus, a social network developed by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., has offered pre-defined groupings such as “family”, “friends” and “acquaintnces”.